sey075

The whole craze over the supposed Maya prophecy of the end of the world in 2012 is based on bogus, commercialized, fake claims. The D-day ("destruction day) is one year off: December 21, 2012. This will not be the end of the world, nor will it mark a new era of enlightenment. The ancient Maya had numerous very accurate calendars. All of them were cyclical in that they came to an end and started over at zero. December 21, 2012 is merely the re-start date of the "Long count calendar," a count of days that started back in 3114 BC (well, at some point in the first millennium AD, the Maya extrapolated the Long count back to a zero date thousands of years earlier). The Maya Long count calendar is just like the odometer on a car. There are five digits, and it ticks one digit for every day. Here are some dates: 8.12.14.8.15  ----  July 2, 292 (a date from the Maya city of Tikal) 12.19.18.17.15 ---- December 21, 2011 (today) 12.19.17.19.19  ----  December 20, 2012 0. 0. 0. 0....

I find that I am not the only one puzzling over the infatuation of archaeologists with the work of Pierre Broudieu and other incomprehensible French social philosophers. Here are some suggestions about what an archaeoalogist can do: (1) Steve Lekson: Use other theorists who are more grounded and make sense. Steven Lekson has an amusing post, "La Maladie Française" on his blog, The Southwest in the World. This blog is fascinating - it consists of chapters and parts of chapters of a book that Lekson is in the process of writing. Readers can follow his book as it is constructed, quite an innovative process. This particular post is about the convoluted prose of Bourdieu, de Certeau, et al. Lekson says: "I have from time to time disparaged French social philosophy.  It’s not so much the content (it’s that too), but rather the language.  To paraphrase Professor Higgins, the French don’t care what they say actually, so long as they write it properly.  Which, for French ...